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You’ve heard of Mailchimp, TurboTax, Credit Karma, and Quickbooks; and chances are good you might even be able to picture their logos or recall a memorable ad. But what do you know about their parent company, Intuit?

The most likely answer to that question (not much) is one of the main reasons that Intuit approached the branding agency Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR) a year and a half ago to rethink its identity. The brand has spent nearly a decade expanding into a broad financial tech platform. It acquired Credit Karma and Mailchimp in 2020 and 2021, respectively. It’s building new tools for accountants and small businesses. And it’s investing in both AI-powered and human experts to help users get more out of their product suite. 

Today, Intuit wants to become “one connected, AI-driven expert platform” rather than a collection of sub-brands. According to Tosh Hall, JKR’s chief creative officer, the problem ahead of the rebrand was that Intuit had no real identity of its own. One key question he remembers his team asking was, in the world of digital transformations for tech companies, Why is it all streamlined in a wind tunnel? Why is it all functional, neutral, frictionless, boring, invisible?

“In some ways, Intuit fell into that trap, not only in the digital technology space, but also in the brand space,” Hall says. “I mean, no one had heard of Intuit.”

Hall’s task, on paper, was simple: to take “something that’s invisible, and make people care about it.” His team’s solution boiled down to a single letter of the alphabet that’s designed to turn Intuit from a featureless corporation into a brand with a personality.

Intuit’s specific brand conundrum is unique, but it’s facing a broad problem that many other SaaS companies are tackling in the AI era. As these software-as-a-service companies race to incorporate new AI-powered features and functions, their capabilities are outpacing how consumers perceive them. 

Notion, for example, has transformed from a website builder to a broad AI-powered workspace; the grammar-fixer Grammarly has ballooned into an AI agent-driven productivity tool called Superhuman; and Calendly has transitioned from a simple scheduling software to an AI end-to-end meeting service. As Fast Company has reported, each of these companies has recently used design to help users acclimate to the shift. 

Like Notion, Superhuman, and Calendly, Intuit needed to use design as a lever to change consumer perceptions; in this case, to help users view the company as one connected AI platform rather than an amorphous collection of sub-brands.

“There’s been seven years of growth and change at the Intuit level, where they’re investing so much in new technologies and new unifications behind all the cornerstone brands—a lot of times from an AI and human intelligence perspective,” says Michael Ciancio, JKR’s executive creative director. “But that technology and investment had become incredibly invisible, and therefore these unique pieces of technology across all four were getting hidden.”

To bring those changes to the surface, Hall’s rebrand team needed a visual north star—and they found it staring them in the face. 

The thread holding Intuit’s new brand together is the letter “i.”

While in the early brainstorming phases of the rebrand, recalls Ciancio, the team was experimenting with ways to make Intuit feel less corporate and more connected with the actual in-product experience. One initial step was to reimagine the wordmark by converting it from an ultra-techy uppercase sans serif to a lowercase, “conversational” serif. In that process, the team created a lowercase “i” with a flag serif sticking out to the left—a quirk that, when animated, makes the letter look like a little person giving a friendly wave. 

That small animated “i” turned into the navigational tool that leads users through Intuit’s new brand. When the user’s eyes need to be guided across a page, for example, or the brand is differentiating between platforms like Mailchimp and Turbotax, the “i” breaks out into color-coded dots called “doers.”  

The “i” also introduces users to Intuit Intelligence—JKR’s term for Intuit’s system that connects users with both AI-powered chatbots and human experts to help navigate their finances. Intuit Intelligence shows up across the brand’s platforms, and because it incorporates elements of both AI and human intelligence, it needed a unified design to help customers instantly recognize its two arms. 

When users are interacting with Intuit’s AI chatbot, the “i” spins and multiplies into a minipropeller icon. And when they’re chatting with a human expert, the “i” is placed inside a blue speech bubble and animated to give a miniwave. No matter where it shows up, the “i” stays in motion to tell the user how to understand a given interaction.

“We began exploring motion early in the design process to define how the ‘i’ could express different behaviors, because static design couldn’t always carry the idea,” says Stubbs Johnson, JKR’S creative director of motion. “For the ‘i,’ we used traditional animation techniques like squash and stretch to make it feel like a character, especially in its cheerful little wave. A seamless link between human intelligence and AI was key to this digital transformation; in a space that leans overly slick, we pushed the motion to feel tactile and human.”

The “i” also gives Intuit more of a human brand voice. Hall says the key question that the brand asks now is, “How can i help you?” In fact, it’s the first thing that users will see when they log onto Intuit’s new landing page, designed by JKR from the ground up. 

Right now, Intuit has rolled out its new brand on its landing page and across its social media. In the coming months, elements of the core brand will begin to appear across the sub-brands to pull everything together. 

Jessica Liao Mayers launched Slate Swim at age 21. Now, after selling the business, she’s already working on her next company.